Yes, I know Uncle Sam, know him very well. He’s a god-damn rat bastard scoundrel, and if I ever lay eyes on him again I’ll stab him in the throat. It is I who deserves to be the emblem of our great Republic, not that foppish pansy, putting on airs with his starred waist-coat and his red-striped pantaloons and the like.
He once tried to run me over with his carriage as I crossed Atwater Street on my way to the Onion offices. I barely escaped with my life, and, to top it off, the wheels of his carriage sprayed mud all over my brand-new patent-leather spats.
It was obvious retribution for my criticism of him in the pages of The Onion. I said that Uncle Sam was more interested in getting his likeness on the political cartoons and mechanical banks than doing the job he was chosen to do, and that he shamelessly swathes himself in the red, white and blue as though he had created it himself.
My father, Herman Ulysses Zweibel, didn’t trust him, either. In fact, back in 1854, he advocated Shot-Gun Lucretia over Uncle Sam as the official mascot of the Republic. She was a seven-foot-tall, 480-pound frontierswoman from the Utah Territory who could shoot and drink like a man and bend nails with her tongue. She roamed the land with a magical yellow peccary and once shot a man for breathing. Pater felt she was a far more worthy and suitable choice to symbolize American tenacity and derring-do than that spangled jackanape. Unfortunately, she succumbed to the typhus, and Uncle Sam was selected instead.
The last I heard, Uncle Sam was lending his image to a recruitment poster, in which he jabs his index finger at the reader and demands that they enlist in the U.S. Army. It is just like that indiscriminate fool: Just anyone cannot join the Army. It will take men of strong character and discipline to hunt down the cunning Pancho Villa!
He makes me so mad, I wish I could pull his beard. Would that there could be a recall election: I would gladly challenge him for the role of American icon, and you can be sure that, if victorious, I wouldn’t strut around like a dandified homo-sexual pigeon with no shame.
T. Herman Zweibel, the great grandson of Onion founder Friedrich Siegfried Zweibel, was born in 1868, became editor of The Onion at age 20, and persisted in various editorial posts until his launching into space in 2001. Zweibel’s name became synonymous with American business success in the 20th century. Many consider him the “Father Of American Journalism,” also the title of his well-known 1943 biography, written by Norman Rombauer.
